Twinkiepocalypse Causes November Job Cuts To Surge 34%

Challenger is out with its November layoffs report. It shows a
34% spike from last year, in large part due to the twinkie.

Job cuts increased for the third consecutive month in
November, as employers announced plans to shed 57,081 workers
from their payrolls. That was up 20 percent from the previous
month when announced layoffs totaled 47,724, according to the
latest report from global outplacement consultancy Challenger,
Gray & Christmas, Inc.
November cuts were 34 percent higher than the 42,474 job cuts
announced by employers in the eleventh month of 2011. Last month
was only the fourth time this year that job cuts exceeded
50,000.
Employers have now announced 490,806 job cuts this year. Despite
the faster pace of downsizing as the year comes to a close, the
year-to-date total is 13 percent lower than the 564,297 job cuts
announced through November 2011.

The November surge was led by the food industry, which saw 19,709
cuts during the month. The bulk of those resulted from the
bankruptcy of Hostess Brands which, after years of declining
sales of its high-calorie snack cakes in a more health-conscious
America, was forced to shutter its operations and dismiss all
18,500 employees.

The next largest job-cutting industry was the computer sector,
which announced 3,313 job cuts in November. That was up 208
percent from the 1,076 announced by these firms in October. The
computer industry remains the top job-cut industry for the year,
with a total of 45,060 announced layoffs since January. About 60
percent of those cuts, however, were the result of the 27,000 job
cuts announced by Hewlett-Packard in May.

“Job cuts this year have really been driven by a handful of
large-scale cuts. This month, the Hostess cuts dominated the
monthly total. Last month, nearly a quarter of the 47,724 job
cuts came from Ford. In
May, it was the single job cut by HP that drove
the monthly job cut total to 61,887, which is the highest level
we have seen so far this year,” said Rick Cobb, executive vice
president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.